Bruce Lee, the Legend

A look at Bruce Lee focused entirely on his movies full of stock footage, a few behind the scenes clips, and lots of completely unrelated footage from other movies! A few talking heads with hong kong actresses that come across staged, tasteless footage from the funeral, including of the corpse! And a narrator that almost ruins it. It's a thinly veiled cash grab from Golden Harvest, even going so far as to hype up Game of Death as the ultimate Bruce Lee movie that they saved. Overall this is a waste of time for any Lee scholars or fans BUT at the time it would have been one of the only ways to still see the clips since home video was still so new. Apart from that, it's garbage. Like Water was better.

I started this show biz bio doc knowing very little of Bruce Lee the person or his films. When it was finished I knew very little of Bruce Lee the person and way too much about his films, the latter courtesy of the copious use of scenes from the guy's movies. Easily 50% of this thing is film clips. The rest is pretty much filler (or, as the previous reviewer aptly puts it, "garbage") consisting of planes taking off and landing at Hong Kong airport, Seatac airport, and San Fran International, Raymond Chow walking in his garden (or some garden) Linda Lee walking through an airport terminal, plus some of the dullest talking heads this side of a Treasury Department presser. Throw in poor print quality and a narrator who sounds like he's doing a 1950s travelogue of Oslo and you can see why this thing merits a C minus.

This documentary which looks at the life of Bruce Lee is filled with many clips from his movies. It offers a straightforward chronological view of his life, from his birt in San Francisco, to his young adulthood in Hong Kong, to his attempts to break into Hollywood, followed by his Hong Kong movies; then, having achieved his crossover into mainstream, while filming his first Hollywood co-production, he died. There is little to stop the legend of Bruce Lee. Cut down just at the point of achieving everything he had striven for, the imagination of his admirers takes over, building castles in the air about what he might have done. In truth, we are left with very little: the four movies made while he was alive, the one cobbled together after his death, the myriad imitators who faded away within a decade, and the respectability of the martial arts movie: respectability in the industry sense, in that you can sell a lot of tickets. In fact, that looks like the subtext of this movie. Lee's movies were still playing worldwide, and this documentary would have appealed to his fans, and perhaps caused them to buy tickets to see again Lee's few movies.

While this is Raymond Chow's official "Golden Harvest" tribute movie about the great Bruce Lee, it makes some interesting, and to me, odd choices of things to include and/or exclude. For example, it mentions his disappointment in not being cast in the lead of the American TV series "Kung Fu," but not the key point that he created the whole idea for the show. Continuing through to his untimely death in Hong Kong in 1973, we get to hear several of the rumors about it, most notably that he was in the midst of an affair with a popular Asian "femme fatale" of the time. But the far more popular theory that traditional Chinese martial-arts extremists loathed Bruce's U. S. schools' equal opportunity education of all sorts of "western" (non-Asian) peoples, and had some sort of deadly poison introduced to kill him. Not a word about the non-salacious story that doesn't insult his and wife Linda's memory! So, I grant it 6/10 stars for a lot of fight footage, some never before seen BTS, but it gave pretty short shrift to his ethical and philosophical POV, both of which were the true essence of the man.

This is Golden Harvest doing their tribute to the legendary martial arts movie star from Hong Kong. There are some interviews, some film stock, and many old photos. Of course, Golden Harvest is heavily favored and that's well deserved although Raymond Chow is the executive producer. It's a lot of old footage and that's its main strength. I love his Hong Kong films as a child actor. It shows the amateur energy and Bruce's innate charisma. Mostly, this is a filmography of Bruce Lee. It's a lot of film clips like a greatest hits album. It does try to address the contraversy around his death. My main suggestion is to get one of Bruce's famous Hollywood star friends to do the narrations. The actual narrator sounds like all those old style documentary voices.

Trailer—Bruce Lee, the Legend

Bruce Lee, the Legend_720p(480P)

source: Bruce Lee, the Legend

An older documentary but surprisingly watchable. Really dives deep into Bruce's early years. But also inadvertently throws more mystery on his death.

Bruce Lee - No comparison at all. He is Invincible !!! Bruce Lee - No comparison at all. He is Invincible !!!